(2 of 9)
Heuristic Is the Word. One of the updaters is the University of Chicago's David Riesman, a man with a wide-swinging imagination, a scientist's disciplined mind, and a burning curiosity about people as they are. Social Scientist Riesman believes U.S. society today to be very different from the picture of it that Americans carry in their heads. To make his point, Riesman presents to his students three primitive societies from Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture: 1) the Pueblo Indians are peaceable and cooperative, with little violent emotion; 2) the Dobu Islanders in the Pacific are suspicious, jealous of women and property; they spend their lives trying to get something for nothing by magic, theft or fraud; 3) the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest are highly competitive, but their rivalry consists in conspicuous consumption: burning up their blankets and even their houses to show off. Riesman asks the class which type the U.S. most resembles. Some say the Dobuan and some the Kwakiutl; almost none say Pueblo—which Riesman thinks is the right answer. To a student who clung to the familiar stereotype, Riesman once said: "If you weren't so pueblized, you wouldn't think of the society around you as being so Dobuan or Kwakiutl."
Riesman believes in individualism as a goal; but he does not believe that the U.S. today is an individualist society in the 19th century sense.
To explain how the individual may attain his freedom in contemporary U.S. society, Riesman has had to examine that society anew. The result is a "construction," a way of looking at the U.S. which is more presently fruitful than older conceptions such as the class struggle or the frontier v. the seaboard. At the very least, Riesman answers the anguished city editor who cried: "What we need around this place is a new set of cliches." No mantled prophet with the last word or the definitive system, Riesman describes his notion of character as "heuristic"—and that is the word for Riesman. It means, says Webster, "serving to discover or to stimulate investigation; —of methods of demonstration which tend to lead a person to investigate further by himself."
On Entering the Zoo. Riesman seems to be leading thousands of Americans on his quest. His central book, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character*, was published four years ago and has already a kind of classic status. Not that it is "accepted"; it draws academic argument and even sneers. But it has become a part of the social-science landscape. A paperback abridged edition issued a year ago has sold 40,000 copies, an enormous sale for a work of this sort, which contains no soothing soul-poultice, no sensationalism, and makes no effort to write down to a lay public. Individualism Reconsidered, a brilliant collection of essays published this year, elaborates some of Riesman's central themes.
The Lonely Crowd contains a typological menagerie. The occupants of the cages are not real people, who are almost always a blend of a blend of types. But real people and real politics can be understood better by walking through Riesman's zoo, reading the signs on the cages, and looking at the occupants.